The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways

by Earl Swift

  James and his coworkers next took the bureau's new state maps and attached a square to each county, those with big numbers earning a big square, poor and unproductive ones a small. Once the squares were blackened in, " we had a series of emblems through which diagrammatic routes could be laid out," James recalled decades later. " Routes through the heaviest emblems were routes through the generally wealthiest and all around most important county areas. Road locations could be made catching obvious local control points along these diagrammatic lines, and you had a selection from best to poorest almost staring you in the face."

  The states had until late January 1922 to submit their choices. They corresponded closely with James's routes. As finally laid out, the Federal Aid system totaled 168,881 miles, or only about 5.9 percent of the total road mileage—and as the Chief noted, it reached 90 percent of the nation's population and included " not one, or two, or three transcontinental roads but dozens of them crossing the country from the East to the West and from Canada to the Gulf and the Mexican border.

  " Through practically every feasible pass in the Western mountains," he said, " one of these roads will be open to the traveler."

  Drawing the system did spark one controversy, centering on a familiar stretch of road: the arid, salt-crusted route through the western Utah desert on which the army convoy had bogged down. Folks in western Utah had been complaining for years about the Lincoln's desert routing. " This Roda serves absolutely No good Purpose, or Parties," one Joseph Conley had informed Logan Waller Page in August 1918, in a letter he evidently typed himself. " Serves No Producers, Not even Tourists and is located more than 50 Miles from any parallel Rail Road and is of absolutely no Military Value, and is absolutely a Eseless and Brazen expenditure."

  The more sensible route for a road to California, Conley had advised, was straight west from Salt Lake City alongside the Union Pacific's tracks to Wendover, a town on the Nevada line, and westward along the Humboldt River to Reno. No such road then existed, and building one would be a job; about forty miles of salt flat stood in the way. Still, Conley's was not a lone voice in the proverbial desert. The following year, Dwight Eisenhower had noted a sharpening dispute " between the Lincoln Highway Association and some of the people in the section west of Salt Lake City" in his after-action report.

  If the bureau paid any notice to such talk, it was passing. Decisions on location and routing belonged to the states; only a flagrantly unsound choice would provoke MacDonald's intercession. The Lincoln Highway Association didn't seem overly worried about the grousing, either, perhaps because its existing route had been suggested by Utah's own governor in 1913, and because, after all, Fisher and Goodyear together had donated $125,000 toward its completion—money that the state had accepted with a contract to complete the road. In so doing, it seemed, Utah had guaranteed that the way west would stay where it was.

  But in September 1919, less than a month after the convoy's debacle on the salt flats, Utah officials halted work on the Seiberling Cutoff. They'd run into equipment troubles, they explained. The following January, they pleaded poverty. In March 1920, their story again shifted. Now they weren't sure they'd ever get around to finishing the job.

  To the Lincoln's directors this represented a breach of honor, as well as contract. Seiberling fired off a series of increasingly outraged letters but failed to budge the folks in Utah—who, despite their supposedly empty pockets, quietly launched work on a Wendover Road. When the state submitted its proposed Federal Aid road system to the bureau in the fall of 1921, it did not include the Lincoln west of Salt Lake, in any form. Not as a primary road. Not as part of the state's secondary system. Every foot of Carl Fisher's highway, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, was nominated for Federal Aid, save for that stretch in western Utah. In its place, the state nominated what was, by and large, a still theoretical northern route.

  Newspapers throughout the West condemned the move as a sleazy cash grab by power brokers in Salt Lake, reasoning that Lincoln motorists bound for both northern and southern California traveled together until they reached Ely, Nevada, where those headed to Los Angeles peeled off on the Midland Trail; by abandoning the Lincoln and rerouting traffic to Wendover, Utah would force travelers to make their southern turn at Salt Lake, onto the Arrowhead Trail, which ran south the entire length of Utah. " Now do you get the picture" asked the Ely Daily Times. " If Utah can force tourist travel to her play grounds she will add immensely to her revenue by keeping the traveler longer in her boundaries." Salt Lake City, a Placerville, California, paper raged, was home to " some of the biggest hypocrites that ever held public office."

  Hoping that the Lincoln's position might play better in Washington, Henry Joy prepared a " brief" on the dispute for agriculture secretary Henry Wallace, 172 pages long and appended by a 26-page letter. Wallace asked the Chief to investigate. The bureau was already on it. It studied both routes, assessing the relative populations of each, the value of roadside property, the traffic, water sources, and supply points, the rigors of the terrain. In most respects the comparison favored Wendover; a road there crossed more valuable land, required fewer curves, and rose and fell less than half as much as the Lincoln. The " one outstanding barrier," the bureau found—and it was daunting—was the salt flats. But with care and money, that could be overcome, and the result would be a more direct, more economically sound, and probably safer road, regardless of the " very strong pride of opinion" that might say otherwise.

  In a May 1923 letter to MacDonald, Wallace announced that the Wendover route was " a public necessity" and wrote Joy that he could " be most helpful in bringing a satisfactory conclusion to the situation" by rerouting the Lincoln to follow the new road. Joy and the rest of the association were in no mood to cooperate. A few months later he informed Wallace that they'd formally rejected his suggestion. " We do not desire to differ," he explained. " Facts compel it."

  With that, the Lincoln Highway hewed to a line that doomed it. For the first time in its history, the association had chosen a route that was bound to be eclipsed in its engineering, its maintenance, its ability to meet the demands of increasing traffic; no private auto trail could possibly match Federal Aid's manpower and money. And as the quality of the Wendover Road outpaced that of the Lincoln, it was destined to sap the older road of its traffic until none remained. No matter how righteous its position, the association would be out of business.

  Carl Fisher was too busy in Miami Beach to pay much mind to the dispute. He opened a new hotel, the Flamingo, overlooking Biscayne Bay, and imported a herd of Guernsey cows to supply its guests with fresh dairy. He built a popular beachfront swimming pool and casino, encouraged a new style of women's swimwear that showed shocking expanses of bare leg, and imported a baby elephant, " Rosie," to walk the beach and pose for photographers. Tourism exploded.

  Fisher hungered for more. He was after a winter home for the nation's wealthy and beautiful, a resort of expansive mansions and palm trees and full-time play. So he built a top-of-the-line harbor for wealthy yachtsmen, hosted speedboat races on the bay, and opened polo fields and stables the equal of any in the country. He smuggled in large stores of outlawed liquor.

  In January 1921, president-elect Warren G. Harding vacationed in Miami Beach, fished on Fisher's yacht, and golfed with Rosie caddying. The visit helped fuel a Florida land boom; Fisher's sales leaped into the millions, then the tens of millions. Even by his standards, he was stinking rich.

  The desert unpleasantness aside, the 1921 act ushered in what the highway industry would come to see as a golden age of road building. More than ten thousand miles of Federal Aid highways were laid down in 1922, three times the total finished since the start of the program in 1916. Two years later, more than that amount was built of concrete alone, and the pace was accelerating.

  Roads ballooned into a huge employer, providing jobs not only for those actually building them, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands, but also for an army of men who made road-laying ge
ar and provided the raw materials. More than 200 American companies made cement, 127 made paving brick, and 42, asphalt; another 380 provided crushed stone, and 340 shipped sand and gravel. The various public officials involved in roads numbered eighty thousand. In 1923, the Chief noted that America's highways were undergoing improvement at the rate of forty thousand miles a year. " At his nod, millions move from the United States Treasury," Motor Life magazine said of MacDonald, crowing that neither " Morgan nor Rockefeller nor Carnegie nor the First Families of Croesus ever had the spending of so much money in so small a time."*

  The new Federal Aid roads transformed the country through which they passed. Farm products were cheaper to transport, reducing prices at the nation's grocery stores. School buses were transporting millions of rural children to consolidated schools, huge improvements over meager one-room schoolhouses. Shoppers in towns overlooked by the railroads were starting to see more than staples at the local dry-goods merchant. Before long, the Department of Agriculture could boast that one could travel from Seattle to San Diego on paved highway.

  What form pavement took, on that West Coast highway and any other, varied from state to state, project to project, even engineer to engineer, for consensus was just beginning to gel on the traits of an ideal highway; the experts differed on the appropriate size and surface and overall form of a cross-country road, on the arc of its curves, its lighting, its capacity.

  The first tentative step toward building some unity of thought came not from AASHO or the bureau, but from the Lincoln Highway Association. While debate over the Townsend bill was still going strong, the Lincoln's leaders decided to build a section of ideal road—a combination of the best available design and construction, a money's-no-object example for the nation and world. In April 1920, the group mailed a questionnaire to 4,600 engineers, seeking their thoughts on the perfect highway, then assembled a panel of engineering luminaries to sift through the suggestions and come up with a model.

  As it happened, the responses offered little guidance, even on such a road's basic form. Most responses fell into three categories: they favored a paved, two-lane highway that could be expanded with the addition of a parallel road a mile or two away; two paved lanes in each direction; or two lanes in each direction, separated in some manner. Variations included segregating trucks from cars and slow from fast traffic. One engineer suggested lanes for horse-drawn vehicles.

  At the committee's first meeting, just before Christmas 1920, members disagreed over whether highways should be lighted, one saying that in his experience " on the lighted highway practically no one used their headlights. On the unlighted sections they had big headlights that made it almost impossible to meet them and proceed with safety." Similar debates ensued on traffic capacity and general design. But over the course of two additional meetings, the members hammered out a common vision of the ideal highway of 1921. It would have a right of way at least one hundred feet wide and a paved width of forty feet, enough for two, ten-foot-wide lanes in each direction. It would be flanked by five-foot grass shoulders and gravel sidewalks. Curves would be kept to a minimum; those that were unavoidable would be banked and have a radius of no less than a thousand feet, enabling cars to safely round them at thirty-five miles per hour and trucks at ten. It would have no roadside ditches and no advertising signs.

  Finally, its surface would be made of reinforced concrete ten inches thick, a decision that prompted Thomas MacDonald, who'd agreed to serve on the committee and was courted to lead it, to boycott the proceedings. The attention of such a panel, he wrote, " should be attracted not to the character of the surfacing material used but to the design of the highway," for recent history had " amply demonstrated that a considerable number of materials will carry traffic satisfactorily."

  That might seem a strange objection nowadays, what with concrete being ubiquitous, the most-used construction material on Earth, a literal foundation of modern life. More than a ton of it is produced each year for every man, woman, and child on the planet, and its advantages are obvious. It spills to the ground a suggestible ooze, ready for any shape, many tasks, and within hours stiffens into a hardy mass that resists fire and insects, endures the extremes of weather, and shoulders tremendous loads. It is liquid rock, the dust of fallen mountains reconstituted, made of all-natural, abundant ingredients.

  But the Chief had long preached spending only as much on a highway as its traffic and loads warranted; to overbuild a road was every bit as stupid and wasteful as leaving it in the mud. An " Ideal Section," as the Lincoln people called their project, did not necessarily mean paved, to MacDonald's thinking—it meant constructed to suit its purpose and economy. Might be macadam. Might be graded dirt. Could still be ideal.

  Not only that, but concrete was still relatively untested as a road surface. America's earliest concrete paving, surrounding the courthouse in Bellefontaine, Ohio, had been poured just thirty years before. The first substantial concrete road building, 250 miles' worth scattered among several states, hadn't occurred until 1912. And there was this: concrete's modern recipe was just two years old.

  The stuff itself was hardly new. The ancient Greeks had used some form of concrete nearly four thousand years before. In Rome, the famed Trevi Fountain was supplied by a concrete aqueduct that had been standing when Christ was born, and the Coliseum, nearly two thousand years old, had a concrete foundation and superstructure; its stone was mere cladding.*

  Like modern concrete, the Roman variety consisted of cement, water, and filler. Mixed, the first two ingredients form a binding paste; the filler, usually sand, gravel, or shale, is added for volume. The only complex part of the mix is the cement, which is derived, in part, from calcium carbonate, a compound found the world over in limestone; heating it in a kiln burns away the compound's carbon and much of its oxygen, leaving behind calcium oxide, also known as quicklime.

  Adding quicklime to water sparks a chemical reaction—heat, gas, and a sticky gunk called slaked lime, which the Romans stored wet, in jars, until they were ready to mix it with sand to create mortar. If the job called for a denser, harder, less porous material, they held back on the sand and substituted pozzolan, or volcanic ash, which they possessed in abundance; the result was a gray concrete of such exceptional strength and durability that it wasn't matched until modern times.

  Over centuries of trial and error, the Romans came to understand that concrete has great compressive strength, meaning it can bear weight placed on top of it, but little tensile strength—it can't be pulled or twisted. They learned that it is susceptible to cracking because it shrinks as it hardens, and does so faster near its surface than in its depths, and that cracks exposed to the elements can spell its end; water seeping into a fissure expands when it freezes, scouring the crack, forcing it open, and over time reducing the concrete to rubble.

  Ancient engineers found that by adding horsehair to the mix they could better regulate its shrinkage, and that a dab of blood or animal fat helped it weather the freeze-thaw cycle; combined with calcium oxide, the fats created a primitive soap, and its bubbles formed microscopic air pockets that enabled the mass to withstand temperature shifts. The ancients used their expertise to build monuments, libraries and public baths, shops and houses, and roads and aqueducts traversing leagues of rolling countryside.

  Then the empire collapsed. For thirteen centuries, the world went without. Roads devolved to mud. Cities were tinderboxes of wood and thatch. The only structures built to last were castles and stone churches, and they could take generations to complete. It wasn't until 1756 that England's John Smeaton, the first person to call himself a civil engineer, mixed lime with Italian pozzolan to create what he called " Roman cement," then used it in the stone-block Eddystone Lighthouse, built between tides on a treacherous rock off England's southern coast. Two lights had already failed at the spot. Smeaton's proved equal to anything nature threw at it, and made his a household name.

  Englishmen patented a succession of cements over the fo
llowing sixty-odd years, each with a slightly different recipe, each claiming a new peak of strength and convenience, until, in 1824, a Yorkshireman named Joseph Aspdin patented an artificial stone " for stuccoing buildings, waterworks, cisterns or any other purpose to which it may be applicable." He named his cement after the finest building stone around: Portland.

  What set it apart from the competition was its mixture of slaked lime and clay—the latter replaced the Roman pozzolan—which together were fired in a kiln, then ground into a powder. Mixed with water, it proved fast-setting and strong. Years later, Aspdin's son William used more limestone in the mix and cooked it in much hotter ovens. This yielded hard, dry nodules called " clinker," which he then ground. The resulting powder was what goes by the Portland name today.

  By the close of the nineteenth century, concrete was in use around the world. Spurred by demand for fireproof buildings and a cheap alternative to stone and brick, reinforced concrete—poured around steel dowels, or " rebar," to increase its tensile strength—had been fashioned into thousands of hotels, offices, and factories. But much was still unknown about the stuff. Engineers understood that adding filler to the mix in the form of aggregate—crushed rock, gravel, whatever— didn't compromise strength. That because aggregate was cheaper than cement, it made sense to add a lot of it. But the specifics were sketchy. Was coarse aggregate stronger than fine? What made the stronger mix—more cement or less water? Should cement be measured by weight or volume? Measuring its strength eluded them, too. Concrete wasn't rated by its finished characteristics, as it is today, but by how much cement it contained per cubic yard. A batch might be described as a five- or six-sack mix, for instance; the latter was presumed stronger, but how much stronger was hard to say.

  The ancients had held the advantage until a Chicago researcher named Duff Abrams published a 1918 paper sharing insights he'd gleaned from " about fifty thousand tests" on concrete mixtures. The most important: water, more than any other ingredient, determined concrete's strength. "One pint more water than necessary," he wrote, "... reduces the strength to the same extent as if we should omit two to three pounds of cement from a one-bag batch." He concluded that " the following rule is a safe one to follow: Use the smallest quantity of water that will produce a plastic or workable concrete."